内容简介
· · · · · ·

Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman&#146;s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media&#151;from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs&#151;it has taken on even gr...

Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman&#146;s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media&#151;from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs&#151;it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining controlof our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.

The book was written in the 1980s, so the most examples the author uses have become obsolete. Also fewer young people are watching TV nowadays, instead we just browse the Internet in search for any.........

Plato, that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversationâ€”to all techniques and technologies that permit people to exchange messages, and how we are obligated to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express, and what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture.

2016-03-03 12:02

Plato, that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation—to all techniques and technologies that permit people to exchange messages, and how we are obligated to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express, and what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture.

Should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. I aesthetic, I believe the name give to tis theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is know as vaudeville.

2014-03-22 00:53

Should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. I aesthetic, I believe the name give to tis theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is know as vaudeville.

It may be of some interest to note,in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just
that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the
transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized
fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned
the age-old problem of information on its head: Where ...

2013-08-17 18:22

It may be of some interest to note,in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just

that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the

transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized

fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned

the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought

information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to

invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to

Excerpt: "Seeing is believing" has always had a preeminent status as an epistemological axiom, but "saying is believing", "reading is believing", "counting is believing", "deducing is believing" and "feeling is believing" are others that have risen or fallen in importance as cultures have undergone media change. 真理的渠道是什么？不同的渠...

2013-08-01 10:36

Excerpt: "Seeing is believing" has always had a preeminent status as an epistemological axiom, but "saying is believing", "reading is believing", "counting is believing", "deducing is believing" and "feeling is believing" are others that have risen or fallen in importance as cultures have undergone media change. 真理的渠道是什么？不同的渠道是通过特定的媒体来实现的。。。对照这个思想，网络流行用语“无图无真相”显得天真而苍白。

Excerpt: "...telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to nay function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a 'thing' that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning." 这一段稍微夸张了一点。某些远程即时交流当然是必要的。但这一段还是非常精彩。

In the show business, public discourse is made by telegraphy irrelevant and incoherent. Photography is incapable of delivering abstract idea and propositions; it also presents de-contextualized information.

Telegraphy and photography rendered communication a a game of peek-a-boo. However, it was television that made us to live in the world of peek-a-boo. "Of course, there is nothing wrong with playing peek-a-boo. And there is nothing wrong with entertainment...The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television."

"What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience...the problem is not taht television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining..."

"It is the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business. "

"Television is different (from film, records and radio) because it encompasses all forms of discourse."

"it is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. it is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails."

"Stated in its simplest form, it is that television provides a new definition of truth: the credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition".

"I do not mean that the trivialization of public information is all accomplished on television. I mean that television is the paradigm for our conception of public information."

"An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan... what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming... it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which here has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition... without a vote. Without polemics..."

"Neither do I put much stock in proposals to improve the quality of television programs. Television, as I have implied earlier, serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politic, science, education, commerce, religion - and turns them into entertainment packages. We would all be better off if television got worse, not better."

"The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch."

"Does television, for example, give a new meaning to 'piety', to 'patriotism', to 'privacy'? Does television give a new meaning to 'judgement' or to 'understanding'? How do different forms of information persuade?"

"what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking."

Plato, that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversationâ€”to all techniques and technologies that permit people to exchange messages, and how we are obligated to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express, and what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture.

2016-03-03 12:02

Plato, that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation—to all techniques and technologies that permit people to exchange messages, and how we are obligated to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express, and what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture.

The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.

2012-12-23 11:22

The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.

Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers
of the Enlightenment; that is to' say, the clock introduced a...

2012-12-23 11:26

Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers
of the Enlightenment; that is to' say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.

Even such an instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but about psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, the microscope suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind. If things are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our skin, if the invisible controls the vi...

2012-12-30 07:19

Even such an instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but about psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, the microscope suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind. If things are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our skin, if the invisible controls the visible, then is it not possible that ids and egos and superegos also lurk somewhere unseen?

Plato, that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversationâ€”to all techniques and technologies that permit people to exchange messages, and how we are obligated to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express, and what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture.

2016-03-03 12:02

Plato, that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation—to all techniques and technologies that permit people to exchange messages, and how we are obligated to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express, and what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture.

Should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. I aesthetic, I believe the name give to tis theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is know as vaudeville.

2014-03-22 00:53

Should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. I aesthetic, I believe the name give to tis theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is know as vaudeville.

It may be of some interest to note,in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just
that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the
transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized
fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned
the age-old problem of information on its head: Where ...

2013-08-17 18:22

It may be of some interest to note,in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just

that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the

transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized

fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned

the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought

information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to

invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to

Excerpt: "Seeing is believing" has always had a preeminent status as an epistemological axiom, but "saying is believing", "reading is believing", "counting is believing", "deducing is believing" and "feeling is believing" are others that have risen or fallen in importance as cultures have undergone media change. 真理的渠道是什么？不同的渠...

2013-08-01 10:36

Excerpt: "Seeing is believing" has always had a preeminent status as an epistemological axiom, but "saying is believing", "reading is believing", "counting is believing", "deducing is believing" and "feeling is believing" are others that have risen or fallen in importance as cultures have undergone media change. 真理的渠道是什么？不同的渠道是通过特定的媒体来实现的。。。对照这个思想，网络流行用语“无图无真相”显得天真而苍白。

Excerpt: "...telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to nay function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a 'thing' that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning." 这一段稍微夸张了一点。某些远程即时交流当然是必要的。但这一段还是非常精彩。

In the show business, public discourse is made by telegraphy irrelevant and incoherent. Photography is incapable of delivering abstract idea and propositions; it also presents de-contextualized information.

Telegraphy and photography rendered communication a a game of peek-a-boo. However, it was television that made us to live in the world of peek-a-boo. "Of course, there is nothing wrong with playing peek-a-boo. And there is nothing wrong with entertainment...The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television."

"What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience...the problem is not taht television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining..."

"It is the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business. "

"Television is different (from film, records and radio) because it encompasses all forms of discourse."

"it is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. it is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails."

"Stated in its simplest form, it is that television provides a new definition of truth: the credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition".

"I do not mean that the trivialization of public information is all accomplished on television. I mean that television is the paradigm for our conception of public information."

"An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan... what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming... it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which here has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition... without a vote. Without polemics..."

"Neither do I put much stock in proposals to improve the quality of television programs. Television, as I have implied earlier, serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politic, science, education, commerce, religion - and turns them into entertainment packages. We would all be better off if television got worse, not better."

"The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch."

"Does television, for example, give a new meaning to 'piety', to 'patriotism', to 'privacy'? Does television give a new meaning to 'judgement' or to 'understanding'? How do different forms of information persuade?"

"what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking."